games

Counterarguments:

1. Piracy is easier than ever. You really shouldn't be paying for games in 2015, let alone 2025.

2. Most games that are resistant to piracy are AAA slop that's not worth playing in 2015, let alone 2025.

For almost everything else, I agree, people should be pissed that they're being priced out of their hobbies. But for games, all I can muster at this point is "you still pay for games?"

And there's another point to consider: games used to improve leaps and bounds relative to their predecessors. When you bought SM64 in 1996, you're not just buying a generic game, but you're buying one of the first 3d platformers, a paradigm-shattering game. It's $60 (or however it costs in 1996) to go from SMW to SM64. Can you name a single contemporary game that has the same leap in progress from SMW to SM64? You absolutely can't. You could make the same argument for the old classics like Doom 1 or Starcraft. Going from Warcraft II to Starcraft is worth the 60 bucks while another iteration of a long-running series where barely anything changed isn't. I would argue if you try to value games using genre-defining classics of the past as a guide, the vast majority of games aren't worth $5 since the vast majority of games aren't era-defining or genre-defining or even that good, which is why piracy is the way to go.